AI NPC MMO 🤖, Unreal Live Pipeline 🎮, Perlin Terrain 👨💻
🎮 AI-Driven Worlds & Systems
SEED’s Living MMO: Knowledge Graph NPCs, Bread Wars, and 24/7 Drama
SEED, the new MMO from ex-EVE Online developers at Klang Games, reimagines online worlds with thousands of AI-driven “Seedlings” who keep living, working, and socializing even when players log off. Each character maintains a unique knowledge graph of memories and relationships, enabling rumors, lies, and emergent drama instead of scripted quests. A custom LLM stack powers everything from conversations to economic behavior, producing wild stories like a player-created bread monopoly and a government-imposed bread tax. Designed for older, time-poor players, SEED supports five-minute check-ins or deep dives across roles from family caretaker to president.
Inside Riot’s Unreal Pipeline: Build Recipes and Game Feature Plugins for Live Games
Riot shares how it uses Unreal’s Game Feature Plugins and a custom “Build Recipes” system to ship multiple live-service patches in parallel from a single main branch. By treating GFPs as the unit of shippable content, grouping them into bundles and packages, and driving builds via data, teams can safely iterate on future patches without destabilizing current ones. The talk dives into key pitfalls of Unreal’s default GFP behavior, Riot’s bespoke editor tooling, and how this approach is powering the new Unreal-based Teamfight Tactics.
⚔️ High-Speed Action & FPS Design
From God of War to Gunstoppable: Building a Movement-First Roguelite FPS
In this interview, CAGE Studios founder Salaar Kohari explains how Gunstoppable turned “speed as a resource” into the heart of its boomer-shooter-meets-roguelite design. He details how AAA lessons from God of War informed Gunstoppable’s freer, more exaggerated movement, and how careful pacing, FX, and audio keep chaotic upgrade stacks readable. Kohari also outlines his under‑2‑year solo dev pipeline in Unreal Engine 5.6 and why listening to strangers who “tell you why your game sucks” is vital for great movement.
From AI Concept to Copyright-safe Asset: A Practical Art Workflow
Veteran art director Peter Kujawski explains how GenAI can cut character and prop production from weeks to days while keeping artists in charge. He outlines a concrete workflow: seed AI with your own concepts, auto-generate orthos and volume meshes, then rely on human retopology, UVs, and Substance materials to transform AI output into copyrightable assets. Along the way, he flags legal pitfalls, IP concerns, and common AI failures that can wreck geometry or anatomy. The result is a faster, ethical, and defensible art pipeline.
🚀 Launching & Optimizing Your Game
How Steam’s Personal Calendar Can Supercharge Your Indie Launch
Steam’s Personalized Calendar just went from hidden curiosity to prime real estate on the store homepage, and indie launches will feel it. This article explains how the 8‑week calendar window surfaces wishlisted games to similar players again and again before release. You’ll learn why shadow dropping is now a bad idea, how many wishlists to aim for, and how to time your demo, Next Fest, and launch date to ride the calendar’s automatic promotion.
Mastering Perlin Noise: C++ Terrain Generation for OpenGL and Vulkan
Learn how modern games turn Perlin noise into believable rolling hills with this hands-on C++ tutorial. Starting from a naive “black texture” result, the video walks through correct sampling, multi-octave stacking, and parameter tuning with scale, lacunarity, and persistence. It also covers adding reproducible randomness via seeds and per-octave offsets, then normalizing heights to a clean [0, 1] range. Ideal if you want a robust Perlin-based terrain generator for OpenGL or Vulkan.